Week 9 Reading Diary: British North America, Part 1

(moon and stars, via Pixabay)

Hello again, after the break! I want to do this week's readings a little differently: the stories for this unit are all part of an anthology, and a lot of them have very similar elements in common. I'm thinking I could do one of two things (or anything, really, but these are the two ideas I have!): take these similar elements and recombine them with something else (maybe in the present day?) into something completely different, or take stories from one particular group (maybe the Haida?) and write my story on one or two of them...

Some ideas I have for the recombination story are to write a story about the creation of the world (from the creation of the land/sky/sea to the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, to the finding of fire, etc.), but to use all different elements--I was thinking maybe it would be interesting to write about a bunch of Native Americans from different tribes with these different creation stories attempting to make a movie about a single "Native American" creation story in the present day? A lot of people assume that Native Americans from the same tribe will have similar creation stories, but really there are a multitude of them, and they used to be very localized--which was really affected by all of the relocation and disease, etc. that went on during colonization. I really don't know...I'm still thinking about it...

The other idea--the one about using one or two Haida stories--is actually more developed. I really liked the story about Raven and the Moon Woman (actually any of the stories about Raven in this section I really enjoyed, because I love both Ravens and trickster myths, so a Raven trickster is actually right up my alley). It might be interesting to tell the story of how Raven (in disguise as a baby) came to be Moon Woman's child, and how she felt about this very loud and very demanding infant, and what she was thinking when she saw Raven escape with the moon. It might also be interesting to tell the story of exactly how she came to possess the moon in the first place...I'd have to do some more research into the topic to really get a handle of what I want to write, though...

Source: Myths and Legends of British North America by Katharine Berry Judson (1917).